HTML - Odds & Ends

The Image Map

The Image Map is a creative way to provide links on your site. I think you've figured out by now that HTML is not particularly creative when it comes to presenting text. You can't even choose your FONTS! You can present text with different font styles and sizes if they are imported as graphics. This means you have to create these items in a paint program such as Adobe Photoshop (expensiiive!!!), Corel PhotoPaint (not so expensive), or PaintShop Pro (shareware). There are other programs that will do this but these are the main ones.
In designing a web site one usually starts with a table of contents page. This assists the viewer in exploring your site and it is a central page to come back to. Now, the links to other pages can be as simple (and boring) as a text list or it can be quite imaginative as a graphic map. As a matter of fact, if your site is quite complex you should provide some sort of site map so that people can figure out how to get from A to B. An example of a site map is at www.shuswap.com/site.html. (Hit the BACK button to come back). This web site has 42 pages in it and can be confusing to some. So a site map is always accessible.
The map itself is a graphic. The little boxes on it are defined by x,y co-ordinates in an Image map script. Here is the graphic and below it is the script that interprets it.

I guess the hardest part about doing a site map (and I just had to give you a complex one as an example) is doing all the measurements to get the x,y coordinates. This can be done in the graphics program. There should be a function where the mouse is tracked on the screen and the coordinates shown somewhere.
You'll notice that I included lots of COMMENT tags (  ) in the script to remind me later on what it was all about.
I guess I'll show you a simpler image map.

And here is the script for it

Now let's check out Counters